Jeremy Rosen
An Eye for an Eye

Jeremy Rosen - An Eye for an Eye

- Ladies and gentlemen, nice to be back again. The subject this time is a very, very controversial one, an eye for an eye. It’s controversial for lots of reasons. Some people see it as a cruel, vindictive, vengeful kind of punishment. Some people see it as symbolic. Some people see it as a statement of non-forgiveness, that one should not forgive or forget. So I want to look at the story or the history of this term, and what it can be understood as, how it has been understood, and whether it has any relevance today. And in doing this, I’m going to go on a little excursion through the Jewish legal tradition to explain the process of how we interpret and what the interpretation means. This phrase, “An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth,” originally appeared, roughly speaking, 4,000 years ago at the time when we estimate Abraham would’ve been living. It’s mentioned in the famous Hammurabi Code. The Hammurabi Code is a code that was discovered in 1901, and is found in the Louvre in Paris. And it is about obedience to the sun God Shamash. And it lays down, for the first time, a code of laws. And these codes of laws that it lays down sound very strange to us from many points of view. For example, murder only applies, is only a punishable offence, if somebody murders an equivalent rank. If a woman murders a man, but if it’s not of the same rank or the same gender, then this punishment would not apply. There are all kinds of variables that were, if you like, in a way, sorted out by the time it got to the Biblical period. But it was a pretty universal code of law, an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth.

This code of law, this statement, was then incorporated into the Mosaic tradition. And again, as we’ve mentioned before, very difficult to put a time exactly on that. But in the Book of Exodus, in the the Book of Leviticus, and in the Book of Deuteronomy, the same phrase is used, “An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a bruise for a bruise, and a wound for a wound.” And in each of these cases, the context is very interesting because the context seems to imply that this should not be taken literally at all, even though people always have. So for example, if somebody without any teeth takes out the tooth of an ordinary person, how are you going to take a tooth for a tooth? And if you can’t, does that mean he or she goes free? Or is there some other kind of punishment? Or an eye for an eye, where somebody with one eye has put out the eye of a normal person, if you take out that guy’s eye, he’ll be completely blind, so that won’t be an equivalent. Bruise for a bruise, did they have some mechanism of measuring a bruise when different people bruise differently at different times and to different degrees? None of this questioning avoids the issue that, in practical terms, it’s simply not realistic. And one of the ways of looking at the text of the Torah, the written law, is through what we call the oral law. That is to say, when you give a law as it is, it needs to be clarified. It’s not enough to stand by itself. So if you say, for example, “Do not kill,” what do you mean by killing? Is that warfare? Is that civil? What are the conditions? The 10 Commandments has this famous word, lo tirtach, or ratzach, which is not the same as la harag, to kill.

So how do we understand what it means? Or when Moses comes off the mountain, so to speak, and he says, “Guys, from today onwards, when it comes to the festival of Sukkot, of Tabernacles, I want you to take the fruit of a nice tree, as well as a palm, as well as some willows, and as well as the leaves of a strong tree.” Now, what is a strong tree? What is a nice, a fruit? We don’t know what it is. There’s no indication what it could be. So the question always is we’ll find that, at that time, how did they understand that law? Now in Exodus, just before you get to the eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, there’s a law about what happens if, as a result of accident, a pregnant woman miscarries. The husband’s having a fight, there’s a fight, she gets in the middle, and there’s a miscarriage. Now, if we were to follow the eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth literally, we would have to find some foetus or some other pregnant woman to compensate. But the Torah, of course, doesn’t say that. It says you should find some financial restitution. And the laws around the Exodus eye for an eye and a tooth through tooth are all laws about financial restitution. So that an eye for an eye looks like meaning a fair equivalent. Similarly, when the Torah uses an eye for an eye and a tooth for tooth later on, it’s in the context of somebody either giving false witness or somebody cursing. These are verbal statements. So if these are verbal statements, the punishment ought to be a verbal one, if we’re to take it literally. But it’s clear that these laws were debated, and the debate of these laws adds an extra layer to the actual written text itself. Now, there’s always been a debate, for thousands of years, as to what is the basis for interpretation.

So for example, when the Jews were exiled to Babylon, and in Babylon they didn’t have a temple or a tabernacle, they had to find some new way of adjusting to religious life. And they adjusted to religious life in one of two ways. One way was to say, “Look, here we are, no temple, nothing. What are we going to do to keep the community together?” And one answer was, “You know what we’ll do, let’s get together, we’ll have a community. And this community, we’ll call the gathering place, the Beta Knesset,” rather like the Parliament in Israel, except there is a lot more fisticuffs in the discussion there than one would like. So there was this Beta Knesset where we get together, now we’re here, what are we going to do? Well, let’s pray for our welfare, let’s pray for return to Zion, let’s pray for all kinds of things, which was new because in the Torah, there’s no law about prayer, all the Torah mentions is that people did. Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob did communicate with God in some way. So they introduced the idea of prayer in a Beta Knesset. But then they said, “Let’s try and discover what else is important for the continuity.” And for the continuity, they decided that studying Torah, study, was the best way, educationally, of keeping us together. And so they introduced what was called the Bet-hamid-rash, the place where you study. And these two areas were examples of innovation, innovation in terms of creating a new reality that was based on the Torah, but went one step forward. And then you had, in terms of ideas, the idea of a Messiah, prior to the exile, was simply anointing a king or a priest, a new one when one had either died or there’d been a break in dynasty. Now what they were praying for was somebody to come and get us out of this mess. And so the term Messiah Mashiach, anointed, instead of just being referring to an act and a lore in the Torah, became an expression of hope.

These additions were built in and developed in Babylonian society. And when Babylonian society was conquered by the Persians, and the Persians allowed the Israelites, the Judeans as they were, because the 10 tribes had been absorbed into the dominant tribe of Judah, they came back to the land of Israel, with permission from King Cyrus, to build a temple. When they got back there, the Samaritans who had been there all along, they’d been brought down from the Assyrians and were living in the north, said, “No, you are not original Jews. We are the original Jews, you are newcomers. And all these new-fangled laws you are bringing from Babylon are not really part of the real Torah.” Now this battle went on for a while. They managed to stop and block the building of the temple until Darius managed to get them going again. But here you had a group of people, the Samaritans, who claimed that there was genuine Jewish law based on the Torah, and there was this new Jewish law which was initiated by what were called the Sopherim, the scribes. Sofer is a very interesting word. Sofer, samech-pey-reysh, can mean three things. It can mean to tell a story, le seper.

It can mean a book, a sefer. It can also mean numbers, le spore. And so these new leaders that emerged were known as the Sopherim, not just because they wrote things down, and as scribes, but also because they counted. They counted the letters of the Torah as part of the educational process. The Samaritans totally rejected them. But then back in Israel, there was now a rebuilt temple with priests, and the priests believed, and they were, and were treated as the authority, and they were also the political leadership. As against them, you had the Sopherim, the scribes, who over time became the rabbis who wanted to interpret. And both the priests, rather like the Samaritans, resented this. A classical example, the Torah says, “Do not burn fire in your homes on a Shabbat.” On the Sabbath. Now, both the Samaritans and the priests took it literally, except for the priests, there was fire in the temple, but not in their private homes. The rabbis, coming back from hot Babylon to cold Jerusalem, were worried about the poor peasants living in the hills. And if in winter when it gets freezing cold, and snows, and everything like that, they are shivering. The wealthy priests could always go down to Tiberius, or to go to Rome, or Egypt, or somewhere hot, or they had plenty of slaves and plenty of blankets, but the poor peasants up in the hills didn’t. And so the rabbis reinterpreted it and they said, means don’t initiate fire, but you can’t provide fire beforehand in order to be warm and in order to have warm food.

This was an innovation, but both the Samaritans and the Sadducees rejected this. And indeed, to this day, the few Samaritans that still survive are divided between those that will have fire on Shabbat and those that will not. So this was an example of where we call rabbinic innovation wanted to make things easier and clarify, whereas if you stick purely to the letter of the law of the Torah, it makes life very difficult for you. And later on, after the second temple was destroyed, the Samaritans were weaker in number and the priests disappeared, there was a movement called the Karaite movement. And the Karaite movement, again, believed on Mikra, on the text of the Torah without all this rabbinic interpretation. So this division between the oral law, as we call it, and the written law goes back a long time and continues to this day. The oral law, initially, was not written down, and they did not want to write it down. And in fact, there was a tradition that you must not write it down, because if you write it down, it becomes fossilised. But over time, people felt the need to because, with the various diasporas, and the various conquests and persecutions, there was a fear of losing these traditions.

Now it’s in this context that the rabbis set about completely overturning certain clear laws in the Torah. For example, there’s a law in the Torah which says, if there is a rebellious son who does not listen to their parents, and not only that, but he is a drunkard and a wastrel, they can bring him to the authorities. And the authorities, if they see fit, can condemn him to death. Now, the rabbis clearly thought this is ridiculous from lots of points of view, and unworkable from lots of points of view. How many parents are going to do that to their parents? And how many, anyway, they started setting about seeing how it was impractical. For example, he’s called a ben sorer u'moreh, a rebellious son. So if he’s a son, that must mean he’s under the age of 13, because then he’s an ish. So how many under 13s are there totally out of control? Well, probably a lot nowadays, maybe more then. But not only, they say, has to be zolel we-sobe, the Torah says, he has to be a drunkard and a glutton, totally out of control. How many 13 year olds are likely to be gluttons and are likely to be totally out of control? And so the rabbis in the Talmud, which became the oral law when it was finally written down, said, “Look, first of all, it says the mother and father, both of them must grab hold of him.” Well, at the age of 13, both of them can. But what happens if one parent disagrees? Secondly, what happens if a kid is not drunk, or if a kid is not a glutton? How do you charge him? And by the time they’d finished pulling this law apart, they said to the conclusion. There never was a case.

So they say, “Well then, why is it there in the Torah?” It’s there in the Torah to warn us about the importance of parenting, and the significance, and what can happen if things go wrong. But it’s not meant to be taken in that sense literally. Or they gave another example of what happens when, according to the Torah, if a man suspects his wife of adultery, and has warned her not to consort with a fellow, and she insists on consorting with a fellow and ignoring the husband though he’s warned her, then they say, “We must take this guy, this woman, to the temple, to the priest, and give her some water to drink with God’s name dissolved in it with dust. And then the priest will pronounce a curse and say, ‘If you have misbehaved, this is going to affect your body, and your body will show that you are guilty. And if not, the water will pass through. You’ll be perfectly innocent. Go back to your husband and have children.’” Well forget the whole idea of these trials that, these ordeals, trial by ordeal, which were common in Europe until a couple of hundred years ago, but in those days were very, very common. The rabbis don’t like the idea of a trial of an ordeal. And not only do they not like it, but they say this is impractical. And it’s impractical, first of all, because why should men have the right to do that to the women and women not have the right to do it to the men? And therefore, basically what they said, we are stopping this law. We are cancelling this all out. We’re leaving it on the books. It’s on the books for everybody to see in order to understand the idea of infidelity, but we are not making it practical. And there were other areas where the rabbis, through this oral law, completely changed the understanding and the nature of these laws in the Torah.

Then you had laws of witnesses. Witnesses, according to the Torah, could only be at least two males, and you needed two. But they were prepared to find situations in which a woman could give evidence, situations in which one evidence was enough to deal with certain issues. So they were very, very creative. And not only that, they added things which were not modifications altogether. So for example, they added the idea that a marriage can only take place when both parties equally agree. Now the fact that later on, until recently, these people were forced to get married is neither here nor there. But they also insisted that you can’t get married unless you have a document called a ketubah in which financial guarantees are there, built in to protect the wife in the event of divorce or in the event of widowhood. And this is a must, a requirement, and without it you can’t get married. Well, the Torah said you could get married under lots of different conditions. And then possibly one of the most interesting theological developments is the idea of the seven commands of Noah. There is no direct evidence in the Torah of there being seven laws of Noah. And yet the rabbis in the Talmud developed this idea that if a non-Jew adheres to these seven basic laws, then they are treated as one of the pious of the nations and are not considered idolaters, which was idolatry, the main opponent of the Bible. And so they looked into the Bible, into the Torah, and they looked at how can we base this idea we want to have on the Torah. They found certain texts which led them to the conclusion that, obviously, God is important, but there’s no law you must believe in God.

There is a law which says that you cannot worship other gods and there’s a law which says you can’t curse God. So as far as God is concerned, an important thing is not to reject the idea of God and not to worship idols. And then the idea of not murder, ‘cause after all Cain murdered Abel. Don’t steal, don’t commit adultery, all things that are indicated in the Torah as being wrong. And then they added something which was also obvious in the Torah. You must have a judicial system, courts of law, fair resource to address the problems that exist, legally. And finally, in many ways very significant, don’t be cruel to animals, which was derived from the idea that you may not take a limb from a living animal. In those days they didn’t have fridges, deep freezers. And so they’d chop off a leg, let the animal go on in pain and suffering until they needed the other leg, and so forth and so on. So these seven laws became very important and were debated in the Talmud and argued about. And there is still a debate and a discussion in the Talmud about exactly how we word each one, and which one, and how we define it. And this constant debate and discussion goes on. And so indeed it went on on this issue of an eye, an eye, a tooth, a tooth. There were some people who indeed wanted to say, “Maybe we should take this literally.” But the overwhelming majority of the rabbis and the decision was, no, you can’t, it was never meant to be, it isn’t, and stop thinking in those terms.

All you can do is say that in the judicial system, there must be fair equal justice for everybody, and punishment, if it is to be there, has got to be equivalent and fair, and redress has to be judged before the courts. So you can see that when people then nowadays like to throw at us Jews, “Look how cruel you were with this eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth,” that assumes that they are ignorant because they simply don’t know about the process of discussion and debate from over 2,000 years ago. But the problem with the oral law, which as I’ve been describing it, is a wonderful phenomenon because it allows for discussion, debate, different opinions, conclusions. It’s in a sense a kind of a very loose uncontrolled system. And so what happened was that during the Talmudic era, the rabbis decided, look, just as in logic, you have certain rules of logic, now we’re going to have rules of deduction. How can you use deduction when dealing with written laws and laws that have to be interpreted? You can’t let any Tom, Dick, and Harry just say, “Oh, I think it should be this way.” And so they built, initially, 13, and some went beyond into the 20s, of the criteria for how you should interpret. But this interpretation was constantly open to discussion. So some people like to look at the Torah and the oral law as a kind of a constitution, and in certain ways it was and is a constitution. However, there is no Supreme Court that can make a final judgement . Instead, you have a system of experts, experts giving their opinion.

After the period of the Talmud, when the Talmud was completed, roundabout 1,300, 400 years ago, the rabbis decided that it was time to set down all these discussions, but not only to set them down, but to decide what was the law. And the trouble was, at that stage, there were rabbis, most of them were in Babylon, there were rabbis in Egypt, there were rabbis in Italy, in Greece, all around the Roman and the Persian Empire. And in each of these communities, their rabbis were the authorities, and they were the ones who decided what was going to be a law, and what was going to be accepted and what was not. And they had different customs very often, depending on the climate, the difference of the climate. And in this early period, the fact was that, according to Jewish law, the rabbi of the community, the mara d'atra in Aramaic, the master of the land, his word was law. And this was where all these different customs started emerging, different customs in the Oriental world, different customs in the Ashkenazi world. The first complete collation of all these laws was by Maimonides, born in Spain, ending up being kicked out and ended up in Egypt, and composing his book, Mishneh Torah, of the laws that had accumulated to that time. But he didn’t give sources and he didn’t give different opinions. And a lot of the rabbis at the time didn’t want to accept it. And besides, they said he is writing from Egypt in the context of an Islamic world and an Islamic culture.

And so within a couple of years, hundreds of years actually, it was decided we need to codify this law in a much more structured way. And the first person to do this was the famous Rabbi Josef Karo, who lived in Israel in the 16th century. And he wrote a book which is called the Shulhan Arukh, the table that is laid. And his idea was to say this, look, I want, this is a popular book. I want everybody to have access to this book so that you don’t go, need to go to the rabbi to ask anything, because here it is in the book for you. And his idea was that everybody would go through it during the course of a year and be familiar with the laws of how to behave without having going into the whole debate of different opinions that went on earlier. And this was a massive success. Except immediately, the Ashkenazi world turned around and said, “Oh, this is written with for Sephardi authority for a Sephardi world, what about us?” And so they had to write. Rema Isserles then wrote an Ashkenazi version of the Shulhan Arukh and added his commentaries. And over the years, both continued to have their new developments as society changed, as new situations arose. And the customs were essentially local and passed down. With the advent of the printing press, the printing press made texts much more readily available to everybody. And as a result of this, things became slightly more standardised.

But there were problems with the standardisation because some communities clearly had very different sets of customs, the most obvious one, which you’re all familiar with, is that in the Ashkenazi world, you don’t eat kitniyot, beans and rice and pulses, on Pesach, whereas in the Sephardi world, you do. And then there were other variations of customs, one-day festival, two-days festival. There was a question of when do you read the Torah. How often do you read the Torah? Everything was out there and it was discussed. But as the printing press became, enabled much more documentation to be shared and passed round, this began to, if you like, shrink the variety of options that were available. But even so, within the framework of the constitution, developments kept on going on. One of the most important developments was the publication of a book called “The Zohar,” the book, the central book of the Kabbalah, which added on a tremendous amount of new laws and ideas that had not been seen before in customs. And some communities accepted them, notably the Oriental communities and the Hasidic communities, and others did not, notably the central European mainstream Ashkenazi communities, or the Lithuanian communities did not. So this multiplicity of laws became confusing. And as we have progressed, we have faced different circumstances that have affected the nature of Jewish law as we see it today.

Once modernity enters into the scene, we have a new way of looking at things in which secular values begin to encroach on religious values. And it’s led to splits in the community, and not only splits on the right side between the Hasidim and within the Hasidim, between the ultra Orthodox and within them, between the so-called modern Orthodox, the nationalist Orthodox, between the conservative movement, the reconstructionist movement, between the reform movements, and all the variations that they all have and the varieties. And in one sense, it looks like a complete free for all. And in fact it is. How, therefore, with those like me who feel that we need to have a constitution, that we need to have a base on which we build or from which we stray, how do we deal with that situation now? If then they were able to reinterpret things, like eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, why are we not able to do it now? And there are several ways of looking at this. One of them is to say the way of changing Jewish law within the orthodox world and its varieties now is through a process which is known as responsa, which is called she'elot u-teshuvot, questions and answers. So what happens is somebody is going to post an opinion, a document, an opinion on a question, for example, a question of can we now consider brain death instead of just the old fashioned way of a feather under the nose, measuring for the pulse, or the heartbeat, or the breath. So this paper, this is an actual case, came out some 50 years ago, and was slammed by everybody else who said, “How can you say such a thing? We’ve always looked at it this way. We must always go on looking at it this way. You can’t bring in this new idea.”

But then somebody writes a paper arguing rationally why this isn’t going to work. And he will argue, or she will argue, from a religious point of view, against the first, and the other one will write back, and there will be a to-ing and fro-ing. And this to-ing and fro-ing may go on for some time until eventually either there is a universal agreement or there is a decision that I will make a decision, as the rabbi of my community this way, and he will make, or she will make, the decision that way. But this situation is a flexible one, and certain ideas are accepted and certain ideas are not accepted. You may say, but look, this is too loose, we need a proper structure. And there is an argument in favour of that. The trouble is where you look around at other structures, they don’t seem so much better. Look at the Supreme Court in the United States of America. Or consider, for example, the authority of the Pope under Catholicism. Is that what you would like? Would you like law to be decided by political appointees? Or would you like it to be decided by one man who is supposed to be infallible, or his inner circle of cardinals who don’t have, all of them, such a good reputation? And so in fact, there is a strong argument to say that chaos or looseness is a far better system than having too much rigidity, which is one of the reasons why, in general, there is a feeling that having chief rabbis is not such a good idea. People should acquire their status, not by appointment, but by personal charisma or personal qualities. Sometimes chief rabbis might have both of them, but very often they don’t. And so we are left with a situation of an oral law which has merged into the idea of a constitution, which is how we today understand how Jewish law works.

And we all know we are constantly coming across people who have different customs. Just this week I was asked a question of, “We’re supposed to say Kaddish for somebody who’s departed, and the custom in some places is not to say Kaddish for 12 months, but only to say Kaddish for 11 months. But in my community we say it for 12. And then some communities start saying Kaddish from the day of death, and some people start counting the anniversary from the day of death, and some people for the wait from the shiva, from the moment of mourning and count from there. And you have all these different customs, is one right and the other one wrong?” No, but nowadays, for some reason, we have come to say to the other, “You are wrong.” One of the people I admire most in this Jewish world is a man called Haym Soloveitchik. He is the absolutely brilliant son of probably the greatest rabbi of American Jewry, the previous century, Rabbi J.B. Soloveitchik, who came from Lithuania, an absolute giant, an intellectual giant in any respect and in every respect. His son Haym is a brilliant academic, lovely guy, not the most sociable character, but we all have our faults. And he wrote a very famous article in Tradition, it’s 1999 if I remember correctly, in which he said, “We have become more and more restricted, more and more narrow in how we are looking at Jewish law.” And he says, one of the reasons, one of the reasons is because there was a time when we all were taught by our parents, and we followed the parents, who followed their parents, who followed their parents, and they had their customs and we followed their customs.

Nowadays, many of us have come from homes which weren’t part of that tradition, became religious afterwards, or were part of that tradition, but strayed and then came back. Whatever it is, that mimesis, that tradition of handing things down from father to son has been lost. And although to this day, almost every book of Jewish law, when there’s a question, tends to include within the options, whatever it was your father did, you should go on doing, or your mother did, you should go on doing, how she baked the challahs, or whatever it was, you should do that way. Nowadays, we’ve come to impose a dominant voice on everybody. And so there are thousands of different customs in each community. But now it’s supposed, if you don’t accept the majority, or what everybody is doing, there’s something wrong. And that is why we’ve come to rely on books rather than on traditions. We’ve come to rely on the text instead of handing down the spirit of the law as well as the letter of the law. And it’s the spirit that we have lost. And looking back at an eye for an eye and a tooth for tooth, this is the perfect example of how we’ve focused on the letter of the law, of how terrible it is, and we have ignored the spirit that goes behind it. In the same way that there is a huge divide between this idea of can you forgive and forget, is it required that you should turn the other cheek and forgive and forget? Or is it important that you remember, but that you don’t necessarily automatically forgive somebody for something they did to somebody else?

Most classical, of course, is the Holocaust. There are famous stories, and Eviso mentions them and others do, of a repentant Nazi who asks for forgiveness of somebody who may have not been in the Holocaust altogether, or if they were, didn’t suffer from him. Can you ask them to forgive you? According to Jewish law, no. Jewish law says you can only forgive the person you have offended. The person who you offended can only forgive you, and it has to be done person to person. Now that’s fine when it comes to the letter of the law, but on the other hand, there are many areas where, for example, we say things to make somebody else feel better. And sometimes, if somebody has genuinely, as we think, repented, should we not try to make them feel better? So this principle, this ambivalence and ambiguity, is something that runs right through our tradition. It runs through every tradition. But it does hurt me when I still see people taking part of our tradition literally without knowing that there’s more than meets the eye. So on that point, I will open up for questions, see where this takes us today.

Q&A and Comments:

Thank you, Jennifer.

Q: “Monty, were the Samaritans not referred to as Cuthean?”

A: Marty says, yes indeed. They are mentioned in the Talmud and described as Cuthean because it’s interesting, there are lots of arguments about where the term Cuthi comes from and its etymological origin. I won’t go into all of them. Some of them are to do with tribes, some of them to do with occupations, and other things like that. But they were also called Shomronim. Shomron is Samaria, Samaria is Shomron, and therefore they were called the Shomronim. And one of the problems with the Talmud, and this is another interesting issue of the problem of the Talmud, is that very often they, the traditions had their custom, and other traditions have other customs of what names they’re called, either linguistically or others. And sometimes the term Cuthi is used to describe Samaritans, sometimes it’s used to describe Christians, sometimes it’s used to describe other sectarians. And the rabbis are divided amongst them as to whether Samaritans count as Jews or not. Some say they do, and some say they don’t, and some admire them because they say, “Those laws that the Samaritans keep, they keep better than the mainstream guys do. They’re very strict on those.” And so there is a great deal of divergence of opinion in the Talmud. But once the Talmud became the authoritative voice of mainstream Judaism, the decision emerged that only somebody who accepts the oral law as well as the written law is Jewish in the religious sense. They might be Jewish in some other sense, in some nationalist sense, or indeed even genealogically. But it is the oral law that is so important, which is one of the reasons why, when the Ethiopian Jewry that had been separated from mainstream Jewry during the Talmudic period and had no knowledge of the Talmud, came back into the mainstream, there was some rabbis who argued forcefully that they ought to be converted out of doubt and asked to accept the oral law. There were other rabbis said, “No, don’t be ridiculous, not at all.” And that division still exists in certain rabbinic opinions. So the question of the Cutheans and their status, that is a matter that was debated in great detail, but in general, the Cuthean, the Samaritans, were respected. But interestingly enough, as you know, the Samaritans are contrasted with the Jews in the New Testament. The Good Samaritan, as opposed to the bad rabbis, because the bad rabbis are so focused on law, they don’t care about the spirit, where the Samaritans, although they’re focused on law just as much as their laws, they have a good spirit. And that was a way that they could use to bash the rabbis.

Q: “What if a wife suspects a husband of having affair,” Tess asks.

A: Well, it’s interesting because the Torah doesn’t allow for that possibility. But in fact, that was precisely the argument that the rabbis used. The rabbis used, if we’re going to give the man the right to suspect his wife, why can’t we give the wife the right to suspect the husband? And that was one of the reasons for cancelling its usage altogether. But the other thing the rabbis said was, “If a woman drinks the water, it searches out the man too. And if the man’s been guilty, he’s going to suffer the same fate.” So they were sensitive to these issues. The main difference between the Karaites and the Samaritans, both of 'em reject the oral law, that’s right. But the Samaritans set up, essentially, a schism and a division from Judaism. They did not want to be called Jews because naturally Jews were the Judeans, and they weren’t the Judeans, they were somewhere else. And they attacked the Judaisms when they tried to come back and establish themselves. The Karaites always saw themselves as part of mainstream Judaism. The movement was a very powerful one in Iraq, mainly in Iraq, in the ninth century, and growing and spreading from there to parts around the Black Sea and some up into Lithuania. But by and large, and at the time, their scholarship, when it came to the Torah, rivalled the scholarship of the mainstream rabbis, nothing like the Samaritans, who didn’t have that kind of scholarship at all. The interesting thing is that, over the years, the Karaites reduced, and they reduced in numbers because they were too strict. Yes, they were stricter, actually, than the rabbis. And so, for example, the Karaites too wouldn’t have fire in their homes on Shabbat. They interpreted the law, let’s say, of the four plants of taking that we take on Sukkot as not being waved the way the rabbi said it, but placed in the roof on the sukkah. But nevertheless, they were very strongly rooted, and saw themselves as the heirs to the tradition. But interestingly enough, there was a big Karaite settlement in Lithuania. And when the Nazis invaded, they asked them to be disconnected in any way from the Jews so they wouldn’t suffer from the persecution of the Nazis. So you can see that, by and large, their self identity was one that had set them up virtually as a second religion, separate religion. But in the early years of Karaitism, there was no, they intermarried, they mixed within the Babylonian community. It was, they were much more integrated.

Q: “Were the rabbis influenced by the more liberal culture in Babylon?” Diana asks.

A: There’s no doubt that the Babylonian culture was different, so was Egyptian culture. And remember, the Jews were caught between them, the Israelites, and they were sometimes allies with one, sometimes allies with the other. So they were open all the time to different cultures. But when you talk about liberal, you mean either liberal in terms of the religion, or liberal in terms of the political or the secular, so to speak, atmosphere. I don’t think anybody was really liberal in the sense we understand liberal then, but they were tolerant of other gods because the policy there was, let’s include as many gods as we can. Let’s hedge our bets, for goodness sake. I mean, if any one of them is powerful, why we wouldn’t want them to be on our side? And so even in Judea and in Israel during the period of the kings and the prophets, they did have multi gods, and worship other gods, and go off the tracks all the time, in the same way that when the Jewish God was on the up, lots of people decided to join in to get God on his side. So it’s no question that Judaism has been influenced by every single culture it has lived under. And we’ve been influenced by American culture, to some extent, some more, some less, some try to withstand, but even those that withstand, sort of was a time when the whole of the ultra Orthodox community banned cell phones and banned computers, and now, more and more are using them. So there are constant changes and the challenge is always how do you preserve the idea of the law as well as the letter of the law, and that remains a challenge. And the only answer is that each one of us makes up our own mind, our own decision, through trial and error, and we decide which community we want to belong to or we don’t want to belong to.

Changing laws in the hands of the Sanhedrin, where does this to meet or redefine any new laws? So I pray we never have a Sanhedrin. And I pray we never have a Sanhedrin because I can’t think, at this moment, maybe in a day it’ll change, I can’t think of 10 rabbis I’d like to make decisions for me, let alone 71. So I think the Sanhedrin had a role, an important role, in its day, but it soon disappeared. We’ve been without it for 2,000 years. I’m not keen on bringing back centralised authority. I think centralised authority, particularly as I see it in Israel today, religiously, is a disaster. So I’m not a fan of the Sanhedrin. I am a fan of rabbis having the strength to make a decision, based on their knowledge, and based on their information, and stick to it, and if other people don’t like it, that’s their problem. My Orthodox rabbi say the oral law is not a Babylonian innovation, but the word given to Moses, those 40 years on Mount Sinai. This is different from what I learned from Orthodox I was in the '60s. What do you say about this? Well, I say about this, it depends how you define the oral law. If you define the oral law as the Talmud, the Mishnah, and the Gemara together, of course that wasn’t compiled until 1,400 years ago. And so that was, clearly there were laws that were developed afterwards that weren’t mentioned on Mount Sinai. So there’s no way that Moses, shall we say, would’ve known about electricity, or would’ve known about jet transport, or organ transplants. What you can say is the foundation of dealing with these issues was laid down in the Bible so that when Moses says, “Don’t steal,” he meant sheep and cows and maybe pigs, but he didn’t mean jet planes, private property, did mean private property, jet planes, intellectual property, or other new developments. So it all depends on how you understand the oral law. As I said right at the beginning, when Moses says, “Take the nice fruit,” what nice fruit? That’s written in the Moses law. But how do they do it the first day? What fruit did they use? Could everybody bring their own private fruit? So there must have been some kind of oral law at the time of Moses, but what we call the oral law now, in terms of Talmud, was something later.

Esther, “Eye for an eye is a good example of judgement at all times.” Well, yes, that’s the beauty of it. If you take it as meaning equivalent fairness, a just equivalence, then I think it’s a wonderful idea. I think Rabbi Maimonides was influenced by Aristotle. Yes, he was, he said himself that he considered Aristotle to be a great teacher. And Aristotle’s ideology and philosophy is to be found in “The Guide to the Perplexed,” his book of philosophy.

Q: Jill, “Thank you for your interesting talk. Why can rabbis not today update laws on old switch lights on Shabbat?”

A: Technically they can. There’s a lot of debate about what constitutes electrical impulses. Is it to do with light? Is it to do with constructing circuits? The debate goes on. And if, at this moment, they don’t agree, they don’t agree for, in my view, good reason, because I think there’s the spirit of the law. And the spirit of the law is that we want to make Shabbat as different as we possibly can without making life impossible. And therefore, we have become so dependent, so dependent on electronic entertainment, on the telephone, on watching one’s computers all the time that we have remained slaves to society. And the purpose of Shabbat was to free us from the things that we do normally during the week and create a day as different as possible. But if it’s the same as all the stuff you’re doing during the week, it’s not a different day. And therefore I think the idea of not switching lights on on Shabbat, and not opening a computer and cell phone, is even more necessary now than it was. So you can see, there are different opinions and different ideas as to how we should change, and therefore the advantage of a structured religion is, in a sense, it puts the brakes on, and says, “It’s not that easy to change.” And sometimes it takes a long time to change, sometimes too long, I agree with you. There are things I would like to see change quicker. But nevertheless you have to bear in mind all factors, and the spirit as well as the letter. We common family are descended from Rabbi Moses Isserles, so somewhere, somewhere in the past, we must be related, because way, way, way back, so am I, from my mother’s side.

Thank you, Rita, for the reference to my website, jeremyrosen.com.

Rabbi Moses Isserles code was called the Mappa. Oh that’s a nickname, Moses Isserles’s code, Moshe Isserles was known as the Rema, the Rabbi Moshe Isserles. And people made the fun comment that as his was, if you like, an addition to the Shulchan Arukh, the table, this was the tablecloth to cover, nice point.

Q: “Brilliant,” Nanette says, “I learned so much. I heard you speaking from German Ashkenazi community. Is not compulsiveness narrow?”

A: Yes, I do believe people have treated religion compulsively. I can think of one famous case of a Hasidic rabbi in London who was very disturbed because his son was such a fanatical Arsenal fan, soccer, for those of you don’t know, Arsenal is a club in London, that he was totally preoccupied, collected every item he could have, article, every magazine, everything, and it was compulsive. And the father turned around and said, “Listen, this is not normal. What advice do you give me?” And I said to him, “Listen, he’s just learned from you. You are so compulsive, religiously. In other words, by being compulsive, you are showing you care about something. And he’s learned from that to be compulsive about his football in the way you’ve become compulsive about your religion.” And people have become very compulsive, very rigid. But in a sense, it’s their support structure. It’s what they feel comfortable in. And I wouldn’t want to take it away from them, I’d just want to say to people, “You don’t have to be compulsive like that.”

Q: Could you spell the name of the rabbi you said is the most important thinker in American Judaism?

A: Well, I’m talking about thinking in terms of Orthodox Judaism, sort of, I think Heschel is a very important rabbi when it comes to thought. But in terms of orthodox ideas, Rabbi J.B. Soleveitchik, S-O-L-E-V-E-I-T-C-H-I-K, J.B. Soleveitchik, and his son is called Hyam Soleveitchik, H-Y-A-M.

Q: Isn’t compulsion towards standardisation of rigour a violation of rabbinical edict to make easier and not stricter?

A: Yes, you are quite right. And not only that, the Talmud says the power to permit something is much greater than the power to forgive, to ban something. Anybody can say, “No, no, no.” It’s much more difficult to say yes 'cause you have to find a good argument. And so says the Talmud. The ability to permit is preferable. But the trouble is that nowadays, we’ve been socialised. We’ve been socialised into communities which set standards and expect everybody to adhere to them to belong to a community. And so yes, we are transgressing the spirit of the law by making things stricter. Somebody wants to volunteer to be stricter, that’s their business, but not when you come to impose it. I’d like to know whether you are going to return to the Tanakh classes as you did last year on Wednesday. I wish you would.

Thank you, Lily. Several people have sent this message in. It’s not in my hands. The decision to end it was taken by the Lockdown University, and it’s entirely up to them whether they decide to reinstate it. The last I heard from Trudy was that she did plan to reinstate it in the spring. And if she did, that’s fine. But I don’t know, I’m just a cog in the machinery.

An eye for an eye, not two eyes for an eye, not a whole family clan for life, exact recompense. That’s a very good issue. You should never, in fact, apply a punishment to anybody else. You can only punishment to the person who has directly offended you. Now, whether you are attacking a clan, that would only apply in acts of self-defense, and in acts of self-defense, you can only kill the person who is attacking you, not somebody else.

Thank you, Francine. The greatest rabbi, Rabbi J.B. Soleveitchik. Not everybody, he’s very complex, his style is very old fashioned, in a sense, very Kantian because he studied philosophy in a German university, but nevertheless, J.B. Soleveitchik. How can we learn tolerance? Only if your parents teach it. I was taught tolerance by my father. My father bred it into me, and my mother, both of them did. I think it comes from the home more than anything else. And that’s a lovely point on which to end. So thank you very much and I’ll see you again soon.